Of Interest

UPDATE: Chris Abayasinghe kindly replied to my e-mail and explained that he had been misquoted on WSO. In fact, the 28% figure is for all incoming college students, not just for Williams.

This WSO thread includes an interesting claim, attributed to Chris Abayasinghe, the assistant director of dining service.

Okay, this doesn’t actually have to do with anything that was complained about on this post, but one interesting thing that Chris mentioned was his belief in the cuisine reflecting the student population. By the time the class of ’15 or ’16 will have matriculated, 28% of our student population will be Asian (south, southeast, far east, middle east).

As we have discussed before, there has been a big jump in Asian American students at Williams. If future classes are as Asian American as the class of 2013 — Does anyone have pointers to 2014 data? — then Williams will soon be 13% Asian American. But 13% is not 28%.

3) What is the breakdown of international students by country of origin? I don’t know. But 31 out of 548 is only 5.7%. Even of all of them came from Asian countries (which is not true), this only gets the total to 19%. Where are the extra 9%?

4) The missing numbers are, presumably, students of Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi or Middle Eastern descent who are not classified by the College (or by themselves) as Asian. These students are placed in the “White, non-Hispanic” category. Yet I would not have guessed that there are anywhere near 50 such students in each class. Also, where does the College keep track of their numbers, if anywhere.

Conclusion: It is highly unlikely that “28% of our student population will be Asian (south, southeast, far east, middle east)” in three years. Or am I missing something?